


You Are as Far as Invention, and I Am as Far as Memory

by ancientreader



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-01-31 04:50:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12674778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancientreader/pseuds/ancientreader
Summary: Uncle Rudi had coached Mycroft, patiently, on keeping his voice calm and sympathetic: “This will all be for nothing if he can tell you’re lying."





	You Are as Far as Invention, and I Am as Far as Memory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thetimemoves (WriteOut)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WriteOut/gifts).



> Many thanks to [TSylvestris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TSylvestris/pseuds/TSylvestris), ever-brilliant beta reader. Title from the poem [“Yellow Stars and Ice,”](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/yellow-stars-and-ice) by Susan Stewart. 
> 
> Happy Holmestice, dear WriteOut! I was tickled pink to have you as my recipient, and I hope this S4–Mycroft & Sherlock combination platter suits you. Alas, the happy ending lies somewhere in the future — but there will be one: the sequel to this is already in the works.

  1. **Mycroft, fourteen (1993)**



“You’re missing Redbeard,” Mycroft said, when Sherlock, wet-eyed, climbed up beside him on the sofa.

*

Uncle Rudi had coached Mycroft, patiently, on keeping his voice calm and sympathetic: “This will all be for nothing if he can tell you’re lying. Now talk to me again, as if I were Sherlock, and this time remember: you believe yourself. Your little brother’s dog has died. You were fond enough of the animal, but not deeply attached. You sympathize with Sherlock, but that’s no reason for anxiety. Give him no room to suspect that anything’s being kept from him.”

“ ‘Being kept.’ By no one in particular.”

Rudi lifted a hand, open, acknowledging the point. “By me in the first instance, next by your parents, last and least by you. — Yes, even though you’re likely to be the one most often and most directly lying to your brother. Mycroft, if I saw any other way — ”

*

 _It will all be for nothing,_ Mycroft reminded himself, _if you cannot deceive Sherlock._ He brought his arm around Sherlock’s shoulders and pulled him in, all elbows against Mycroft’s soft middle. Mycroft breathed evenly, made his voice as warm as warm fur. “He doesn’t feel tired anymore and he doesn’t hurt.” This at least was presumably true, apart from the implied referent of that pronoun.

“I know,” Sherlock said, unhappily, and pressed his face into his brother’s chest. In a moment Mycroft’s shirt would be wet; it wouldn’t do to seem annoyed, though, so Mycroft didn’t. The flat was quiet except for Sherlock’s sniffles and the soft crackling from behind the fire screen. Curious, Mycroft thought, how they could all find the fireplace here comforting, as though the flames behind it were of a different order than —

But their parents never went to bed without making certain that not one ember still glowed.

*

After Victor disappeared, Sherlock had gone looking for him. He was diligent and persistent. He had a nanny, but he slipped away from her and into the village with a photograph, which he showed to passersby: “Have you seen this boy? Have you seen him?” That was his idea of police procedure, then. He got hold of an ordnance map that included the Musgrave grounds and drew a search grid on it, which he then walked, day after day, futilely. Their parents told the nanny just to follow him. Keep an eye. Maybe the obsession would burn itself out finally.

And then he had gone missing for two days and two nights — had made it halfway to London, hiding by day and creeping along the roadsides after dark. He was shivering and his legs and arms were bloody from the brambles that grew along the verge near their home, but he had tried to frighten off the search dogs by shouting at them and waving a stick. “Leave me alone!” he had shrieked at the dogs’ handlers, and then bolted. They caught him again, a hundred meters farther on, sobbing where he had fallen having caught his ankle in a rabbit hole. When the lead searcher picked him up he punched and twisted and bit her; it needed two adults to hold him. At last he surrendered, panting.

The contents of his rucksack, when Mycroft unpacked it later that night at home, were as follows:

> one torch, with spare batteries
> 
> a map with the route to London indicated in red marking pen
> 
> a large-size packet of chocolate Hobnobs, four of which remained
> 
> a canteen, nearly empty of water
> 
> two five-pound notes

“He only hit me, ma’am,” said the lead searcher, holding an ice pack to her bruised jaw. “Not the dogs.”

“Why London, darling?” their mother said. Sherlock stood enclosed by her arms, his face turned away from her. His sister, in the doorway, smiled.

“Eurus said,” he replied, after a long silence. His voice was flat and hopeless. The adults ringed around him, their hands variously in their pockets or pressed to their lips, could barely hear; Mycroft, being fourteen, heard clearly. He was learning to deliberate before he spoke and to plan each utterance carefully, but his learning wasn’t yet complete. “Don’t you know yet that she lies to you?” he burst out. “Don’t you —” Then he broke off, because Sherlock had wriggled himself out of his mother’s embrace and wrapped his arms around his head. Hiding from him, from Mycroft. Mycroft made himself stand straight, to absorb this.

In the next moment everyone noticed that while they were watching Sherlock, Eurus had gone. Their father gave Mycroft a look and hurried off to find her. Everything sharp had been put under lock and key long ago but there was reason to think she had taught herself to pick locks.

Mycroft hadn’t yet begun to smoke, and neither Almeida nor Horace Holmes ever had. Eurus could have got the matches out of one of the searchers’ jackets, that day.

*

 _He only hit me, ma’am. Not the dogs:_ there was the germ of Rudi’s plan. “I think,” he had said, “given Sherlock’s feelings toward animals, we could transfer his affections, and supply him with an imaginary loss — imaginary but intelligible, that is — in place of this vacancy.” The three of them — Rudi, Almeida, Horace — announced this plan in the sitting room of the flat the Holmeses were staying in until they found a new house. Sherlock’s nanny had taken him to his violin lesson, though Sherlock had refused to practice since Victor disappeared. He wore a monitoring bracelet now, which their parents had told him was in aid of a study of the heart rates of children as they changed over a twenty-four-hour cycle. The first time he ran away and was immediately traced, he would work out that that was a lie, but it was to be all lying to Sherlock now, all the time, so Mycroft supposed the lie about the monitoring bracelet didn’t matter. It was for Sherlock’s own good, anyway. Everything was for Sherlock’s own good.

Soon enough there had never been a boy named Victor; on the table next to Sherlock’s bed stood photographic proof of that classic intimacy, the friendship between a boy and his dog. Uncle Rudi had had it at his flat, they told Sherlock, so it didn’t burn up with the Holmeses’ other belongings in the fire. _Do you remember how he followed you everywhere? And the time when . . .? How he barked? We kept his dish in the cupboard, to remember him by. His collar, too — splendidly piratical._ Eurus had been taken away finally; so there was no one to taunt Sherlock about Victor, no one to say _He went to London, Sherlock. He didn’t want to be here anymore; he wanted to live in the Underground._ . . .

Mycroft thought dog-Redbeard had been stitched rather clumsily into their lives, but Sherlock, though he picked at the absurdities in every children’s tale, never seemed to notice anything amiss. So another thing Mycroft thought was that it must have been a relief to him, to stop flinging himself against the emptiness. A liberation. They had given Sherlock just what Rudi had hoped for: a bounded and explicable loss.

*

Mycroft had been staring into the fireplace and wasn’t sure when Sherlock had stopped crying. He hiked up his hip to get at the pocket where he kept his handkerchief. “Blow,” he told Sherlock, holding it up to his face, and, wincing, caught himself before he stuffed it back into his pocket soggy. “Lemon face,” Sherlock said, in glee; he wriggled over and settled into his brother’s lap. Mycroft dropped his handkerchief on the end table and tried not to think about what had got on his hand.

“I dreamt I had a little sister — last night, I mean, not just now. I wasn’t asleep just now.”

“Mm,” said Mycroft. “You used to pretend you did, when you were smaller.”

“I did, didn’t I? And she had pigtails and taught me to play the violin. . . . But I didn’t like her after a while. I don’t pretend about her anymore.”

“No,” Mycroft said. It was getting easier, he thought. Or perhaps it was not easier yet, but surely it would be, soon.

Sherlock sat up, frowning; slid off Mycroft’s lap and stood there uncertainly for a moment, looking at the floor. Still frowning; reaching, now, to tug at his curls —

 _Danger._ Mycroft said, calmly: “How are your mold cultures coming along?”

A breath elapsed. _“You sympathize with Sherlock, but that’s no reason for anxiety.”_ Mycroft took a second steady breath and then, as if a stage hypnotist had snapped his fingers and woken the subject-volunteer, Sherlock’s face lit.

“Mycroft!” he said. “I had an idea for a new trial, listen. I’ve three sorts of bread, three samples of each, and I’m testing them under different conditions . . .”

  1. **Mycroft, sixteen (1995)**



Rudi was out of the country doing something he could neither explain nor cut short, so it was his ADC who delivered the news. Of course Eurus was going to start more fires; that had never been in doubt, if you saw her face as she watched Musgrave House go down. How she got hold of so much petrol in a supposedly secure facility, though — that question never was answered.

And if one remembered how she had tried to flay her own arm so as to examine its musculature, it — well, it was still shocking, but not so surprising, to discover that she had hidden in the flames. _Which one’s pain?_ she had asked, after the pediatric surgeon sewed her up again. She must have found it fascinating to watch herself burn.  

The Holmeses didn’t hold a memorial; who would have attended? They visited the shell of Musgrave and scattered their daughter’s ashes there. “As much as she was attached to anything . . .” Horace said.

“As much as she was attached to anything, it was the object she knew by the name of Sherlock,” Mycroft retorted. “I don’t think we’d better give _him_ the ashes, though, do you?” Lately he had found himself angrier and angrier with his parents. _I’m sixteen,_ he told himself; _even I am influenced by the hormonal floods that accompany this phase of development._ The key was to prevent the setback’s being permanent.

*

Mycroft needed a week to work up his courage before visiting the Diogenes Club.  Having arrived at the front door, he felt sick to his stomach and he spent some time biting his lip, trying to think of nothing, before he could bring himself to lift and drop the knocker. In the end he was able to do it only because he knew perfectly well that the motion detectors and cameras would have registered his arrival, therefore that his uncle had already been informed of it. As he had expected, an usher showed him directly into Rudi’s office, without even pausing to knock. The door shut silently behind him.

It was difficult to gather himself. His uncle was not behind the desk but instead reclining on his prized gray velvet méridienne. Rudi’s cheekbones, prominent even when he was at his most well fleshed, stood out like lines of stone; his sclera were yellow, and since his last visit to the Holmeses, just three or four months past, his hair had thinned. He had not been visited by his colorist in weeks, Mycroft saw. His attire was perhaps just as telling: he wore an elegant plain frock, in hue a matte dark red when normally he preferred sparkle and shimmer. Black flats, no earrings, no makeup: conserving his energy for whatever he absolutely must get done. Understanding this, Mycroft swayed a little on his feet.

“Sit down, child; don’t make me stand and try to catch you in this state.”

Mycroft sat.

“Now, tell me what you’ve worked out so far.”

“I was almost certain that Eurus isn’t dead. Now I know it. And you weren’t out of the country, and you didn’t come in person to tell us because you thought my mother likely to guess. Or you might have been in hospital, I suppose.” His voice had been pitched higher than he meant it to be. He would have to compose himself.

“Almeida never _guesses,_ Mycroft.”

He nodded, acknowledging this truth.

“But you’re quite right, it was to avoid my sister’s powers of observation that I sent Miss Bradfield rather than going myself. And also” — Rudi swept one hand from head to foot along himself — “yes, I have lately passed some few days in hospital.”

“What — ” Mycroft didn’t know what to ask. He was appalled to realize that his hands were shaking. _You’re nearly of age. Stop it._

“What indeed. It’s pancreatic cancer, diagnosed six months ago; it has spread to my liver and lungs and really, I suppose, every other organ you might care to name and some you wouldn’t.” Rudi sagged against the méridienne’s backrest; briefly, his eyes closed. “Don’t worry too much,” he said after a moment. “The hospice staff know their jobs.”

 _I need something to do with my hands._ Mycroft’s palms were sweating, as well; disgusting. He had stopped Sherlock about to tug at his own hair in frustration and anxiety. Mycroft’s hair, however, was straight and clipped close. Perhaps tugging would have helped Sherlock; impossible to know this, impossible to ferret one’s way into Sherlock’s mind. All one could do was improvise external shields for him — those would have to serve.

“Mycroft. Listen to me. The fire Eurus set didn’t kill her, but it did kill three others — a fellow patient, and two members of the fire brigade attempting to rescue him. She is still shy of seven years old, the tightest civilian security available has failed to contain her, and she has so far killed four people. _That we know of._ What, then, to do?”

Mycroft watched the bellows of Rudi’s chest pumping, too fast at first, then slower again as Rudi caught his breath.

“It was decided — and not by me alone — to remove her to the one place where we have a hope of protecting other people from her. The alternative would have been to kill her. I admit we quailed at the prospect. The price of her life is perpetual confinement. With no visitors from the outside world. _Ever._

“So I had your parents, and you, informed that she was dead. I would have liked to leave it at that, my dear child, believe me. But since you have arrived at the truth, I’m going to violate the Official Secrets Act and tell you now about Sherrinford.”

*

Rudi Vernet did have a funeral, attended not only by the Holmeses but also by two other, disparate contingents: one of pale persons, nearly all male, all wearing dark suits; and a second, smaller, of men more variously hued, arrayed in tasteful dresses suitable for mourning. Simple brooches, pearl necklaces, lipstick in quiet shades. The pale persons in dark suits sat in St. Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe’s left-hand pews, the men in tasteful dresses on the right. Horace and Almeida sat in the first pew on the right, with Sherlock and Mycroft behind them.

“Why a church?” Mycroft had asked, before Rudi drifted out of consciousness in his last week. Rudi held up one finger: “Beautiful.” A second: “Solemn.” A third: “And St. Andrew-by-the- _Wardrobe._ How could I resist?” The building was not at all secluded, yet it was easily passed by, and Rudi must have enjoyed that aspect of his choice too. Too late now to inquire further into this or any other of his uncle’s decisions.

Sherlock, seated at Mycroft’s left and on the aisle, had opened a jeweler’s loupe — filched, Mycroft saw, from their father’s workbench — and busied himself inspecting the wood of the pew, the paper on which the order of service had been printed, the skin on the front and back of his own hand, and the weave of Mycroft’s trousers. He had smuggled a small pad and a pen into the church with him, against their parents’ express command, and from time to time he made a note of his observations. Mycroft, sitting perfectly straight and resting his hands on his umbrella, watched him out of the corner of his eye.

 _“It was decided, and not by me alone . . .”_ There was a space at Mycroft’s right, but no one sat in it, and Sherlock was safe.

In Mycroft’s breast pocket was the letter Rudi had written for him, to make his way clear. Mycroft had watched as his uncle struggled to advance each line cleanly across the page and then to bring his hand and pen back to the left margin and do it all again. “Pity you can’t write English in boustrophedon,” Mycroft had essayed, but by then Rudi had been unable even to spare a smile.

If Mycroft pressed his left arm inward he could just make out the stiffness of the heavy cotton paper. He would have to find somewhere secure to keep it until he could call with it at the Diogenes Club. “I expect the vetting will, in your case, be entirely pro forma,” Rudi had said.

The atmosphere of the club might be congenial, Mycroft thought, watching Sherlock scribble. He would have his place there, among the pale people in dark suits, the ones in charge of the secrets: the ones, he hoped, like him.

 

 

 

 


End file.
